Tears of Gold: Portraits of Yazidi, Rohingya, and Nigerian Women

By Hannah Rose Thomas, HRH The Prince Charles, former Prince of Wales and Prince Zeid bin Ra’ad al-Hussein

Raises awareness of plight of refugees and internally displaced people

Perfect gift for the globally conscious humanitarian

Lavishly reproduced artwork in elegant hardcover coffee table format

Ideal feature for International Women’s Day (March 8), Women’s History Month (March), World Refugee Day (June 20)

Publisher profits donated to charity

• Language: English
• Publisher: Plough Publishing House
• Release date: Feb 6, 2024
• ISBN: 9781636080987

Hannah Rose Thomas

Hannah Rose Thomas is a British artist and human rights activist. A Forbes 30 under 30, her work has been exhibited at the UK Houses of Parliament, European Parliament, the International Peace Institute in New York, Lambeth Palace, Westminster Abbey, and The Saatchi Gallery. Three of Thomas’ paintings of Yazidi women were chosen by HRH Prince Charles (now HM King Charles III) for his exhibition “Prince & Patron” in Buckingham Palace. She has been named a winner of Vogue’s Future Visionary award, and is a winner of the European Parliament’s Women’s Leadership Award. Tears of Gold was featured by Google Arts and Culture to mark the UN’s Official 75th Anniversary Program, “The Future Is Unwritten: Artists for Tomorrow.” Thomas is currently a UNESCO Art Lab for Human Rights and Dialogue PhD Scholar at the University of Glasgow.

Book preview

Cover: Tears of Gold, Portraits of Yazidi, Rohingya, and Nigerian Women by Hannah Rose Thomas

Hannah Rose

Thomas

Tears

of

Gold

Portraits of Yazidi, Rohingya, and Nigerian Women

Published by Plough Publishing House

Walden, New York

Robertsbridge, England

Elsmore, Australia

www.plough.com

Copyright © 2024 by Plough Publishing House

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-63608-080-2

5 4 3 2 1 24 25 26 27 28

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63608-098-7

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Thomas, Hannah Rose, author, artist.

Title: Tears of gold : portraits of Yazidi, Rohingya, and Nigerian women /

     Hannah Rose Thomas.

Description: Walden, New York : Plough, [2024] | Includes bibliographical

     references. | Summary: "A celebrated young British artist uses her gift

     to convey the dignity and resilience of women survivors of violence in

     forgotten corners of the world"-- Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023038727 (print) | LCCN 2023038728 (ebook) | ISBN

     9781636080802 (hardback) | ISBN 9781636080987 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Thomas, Hannah Rose--Themes, motives. | Abused

     women--Portraits. | Yezidi women--Portraits. | Women,

     Rohingya--Portraits. | Women--Nigeria--Portraits.

Classification: LCC ND1329.T38 A4 2024 (print) | LCC ND1329.T38 (ebook) |

     DDC 759.2--dc23/eng/20231011

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023038727

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023038728

Printed in Canada.

Since my escape I have learned how often women are victimised by war, from Rwanda to Bosnia, from Syria to Myanmar. Yazidi women now belong to a vast network of survivors of rape and enslavement. Rather than emphasising our victimhood, that connection to other women empowers us to take back our lives and to fight for our community’s future. Like those brave women, Yazidi survivors are much more than victims.

Nadia Murad Basee Taha

Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, 2018

Foreword

HRH The Prince Charles, former Prince of Wales

Preface

Prince Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights

The Art of Attention

An Introduction

Portraits of Yazidi Women

Who Escaped ISIS Captivity

Portraits of Rohingya Women

Refugees from Myanmar

Portraits of Nigerian Women

Survivors of Boko Haram and Fulani Violence

Portraits from Other Conflicts

Afghan, Ukrainian, Uyghur, and Palestinian Women

Afterword

Christopher Bailey, World Health Organization

Acknowledgements

Notes

About the Author

Foreword

I first saw Hannah’s striking portraits at her Degree Show in the summer of 2018. She had just successfully completed the two-year master’s programme at my School of Traditional Arts in East London. I was immediately struck by the power and dignity of the women’s faces. In fact, I was so impressed I chose three of her portraits of Yazidi women (who escaped ISIS captivity) to include in my exhibition Prince & Patron held at Buckingham Palace in 2018.

Hannah’s portraits also include Rohingya women who fled violence in Myanmar and Nigerian women who survived Boko Haram and intercommunal violence. Hannah had the privilege of meeting these women when she was organising trauma-healing art projects for survivors of religious persecution and forced displacement. These projects took place in Iraqi Kurdistan, Bangladeshi refugee camps, and in northern Nigeria.

One of Hannah’s aims is to capture not only the courage and stoicism of the women who have suffered so much, but also the nobility, dignity, and extraordinary compassion that many of them manage to retain, despite their traumatic experiences. Her use of traditional painting techniques along with gold leaf (learned at my School of Traditional Arts), together with her spiritual outlook and intention, elevates the portraits to almost the status of icons – transforming the particular into the archetype and the individual mother into the Universal Mother, thereby speaking to every woman.

I very much hope that this beautiful book, Tears of Gold, will help enable the Yazidi, Rohingya, and Nigerian women’s voices to be heard, as well as to highlight the issue of the persecution of religious and ethnic minorities in general. All too often, their stories of suffering remain unseen and unheard – but Hannah Thomas is doing tremendous work in bringing their stories out into the open. May her powerful paintings spread the word and, God willing, have a positive impact in relieving the suffering of some of the most vulnerable and marginalised communities around the world.

HRH The Prince Charles

former Prince of Wales

Preface

Human emotions are a cipher – sometimes so contradictory that to read them effectively can become a lifelong exercise, and only when we know someone long enough are we able (perhaps) to discern their more complex feelings with some degree of confidence. But what if there is no voice or sound from that person, and a meeting is only momentary? In such cases, we would hope the individual is at least close-up; we could then pick out the smallest alterations in their facial features. And what if the individual is not there at all – and we are staring at an image of them, courtesy of an artist or a photographer? The challenge to forming a reasonable estimate of that human’s state of mind becomes daunting indeed. There is no motion to the thread-like creases of the skin, no faint rotation of the neck, no slight pause after eye contact has been broken off to help us understand what the observed human actually feels. And only the most talented photographers and artists would be able to draw out real emotion or mood from such a fixed image.

Fortunately, one such artist is Hannah Rose Thomas, a remarkable painter and storyteller. Her book Tears of Gold is not simply an exposé of her artistic skill; it is much more than that – it is her deposition, her witness statement to the suffering of fellow beings. Containing the portraits of thirty-three survivors of extreme violence (sexual and genderbased violence in the case of many), the book centres on their individual stories and, by extension, the